Thursday, October 23, 2008

I'm sitting in my room at the Brewery Gulch Inn in Mendocino, CA, wondering what possessed me on my two-day vacation to create a blogspot--particularly another blogspot about poetry--whenever so many already exist. I could be walking on the gorgeous beach 100 yards from my deck. I could be staring at The Pleides to make sure that I can still see seven (egads--was it eight?) stars in order to prop up my illusion that I am still in the elite group of runners that death will never catch, no matter how good a time it posts. I could be crawling into bed in order to just try to sleep off the last soul-deadening year of working in retail.

Or I could be writing. Writing about falling under the spell of poetry years ago in LasCruces, New Mexico at a poetry reading by William Stafford. The poems he read seemed to somehow both loosen the restraints upon what I thought a poem could be, as well as set a higher standard for the energy required for language to break through the barrier separating pragmatic discourse from art, and prose from poetry. One poem, in particular, spoke to the paradoxical ease and difficulty of stepping from one into the other of these parallel worlds--a poem entitled "Near."

Near

Walking along in this not quite prose way,

we both know it is not quite prose we speak.

And it is time to notice the intolerable snow

innumerably touching before we sink.

It is time to notice, I say, the freezing snow

hesitating toward us from its gray heaven.

Listen! It is falling not quite silently,

and under it still you and I are walking.

Maybe there are trumpets in the houses we pass

or a red bird watching from an evergreen.

But nothing will happen till we pause to flame

what we know before any signal's given.

"Walking along in this not quite prose way/we both know it is not quite prose we speak," Stafford began, pointing to the apparent ease with which we can step from one path to the other. But then he zeros in on the clear elemental distinction between the malignant ice of complacency and the focused fire of liberation from mediocrity that is possible to create by contrasting the "intolerable snow...the freezing snow, hesitating toward us from its gray heaven" with the implied spark that we must "pause to flame" before anything truly creative will happen.

These penultimate and ultimate lines ("But nothing will happen till we pause to flame what we know/before any signal's given") really grabbed onto me, and I grabbed onto them by returning to my dormitory room and memorizing the entire poem. I continued to recite this poem during the next several years to provide the motivation to keep on writing no matter what was going on in my personal life.

To answer the question as to why I'm up at midnight writing this blog is that I'm tired of what's falling all around us, and if we ever have a hope of melting the glacial build-up, we must "pause to flame what we know before any signal's given."

was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for over a decade. Terry has published in numerous literary journals, including Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His first full-length collection of poems, In This Room (CW Books, 2016), is now available, and his second, Dharma Rain, was released by Saint Julian Press in October of 2016. Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College, an assistant editor at Trio House Press, and a free-lance poetry consultant. For more information about him and his work see www.terrylucas.com

"I'm going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk...to make it confess everything." LL

About Me

was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for over a decade. Terry has published in numerous literary journals, including Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His first full-length collection of poems, In This Room (CW Books, 2016), is now available, and his second, Dharma Rain, was released by Saint Julian Press in October of 2016. Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College, an assistant editor at Trio House Press, and a free-lance poetry consultant. For more information about him and his work see www.terrylucas.com